TED Blog » Live from TED2013http://blog.ted.com
The TED Blog shares interesting news about TED, TED Talks video, the TED Prize and more.Tue, 31 Mar 2015 18:08:48 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/909a50edb567d0e7b04dd0bcb5f58306?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png » Live from TED2013http://blog.ted.com
Can limitations make you more creative? A Q&A with artist Phil Hansenhttp://blog.ted.com/can-limitations-make-you-more-creative-a-qa-with-artist-phil-hansen/
http://blog.ted.com/can-limitations-make-you-more-creative-a-qa-with-artist-phil-hansen/#commentsTue, 05 Mar 2013 19:15:49 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=72332[…]]]>Phil Hansen has tattooed bananas, drawn a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups and created a Jimi Hendrix portrait out of matches, which he then burned. In other words, he isn’t the kind of artist who feels bound to paint on canvas.

So how did Hansen happen upon such fascinating methods? By embracing a major limitation — a hand tremor that made it impossible for him to do the pointillist drawings he loved.

The theme of transcending constraints and roadblocks was a major theme at TED2013. While Hansen said in his talk, “Embracing the limitation can actually drive creativity … We need to first be limited in order to become limitless,” filmmaker Martin Villeneuve echoed the sentiment in his talk about making a sci-fi movie for $2 million. He said, “If you treat the problems as possibilities, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing ways.” And TED’s own Lisa Bu shared how she found her true calling when her dream of being an opera singer died. In a powerful moment of her talk, she said, “‘Coming true’ is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”

Fascinated by this message, I asked Hansen a few questions at TED2013.

The power of limitations has been a real theme so far this conference. Why do you think this hasn’t traditionally been a part of the conversation about creativity?

I think due to the economy, we’ve been running into a spike of constraints while at the same time being more culturally fascinated with creativity than ever. One of the speakers, Danny Hillis, said “It’s hard to get people to focus on plan B when plan A is working so well.” Now we are in a place where lots of “plans As” are no longer working. Being forced to reevaluate is allowing us to see this connection between limitations and creativity that has always been right in front of us. Within this process, we are bringing curiosity back — curiosity about new possibilities that we hadn’t explored when plan A was working so well. And we are discovering better alternatives, as I’ve witnessed here from a lot of speakers so far at TED.

I’m curious — have you had any ideas for works since being at TED?

There’s really not an off button — I’m always running ideas in my head. A lot of ideas have surfaced in conversations with other attendees about possible collaborations that I’m really excited about.

I’ve been contemplating a text art project where I ask people to share their stories about limitations with me. I’ve had so many people come up to me and share their stories that I feel inspired to take this project on a bigger scale. I want everyone who looks at this piece to be able to find a story that they can relate to in looking at their own limitations.

So let’s say you’re a writer/artist/musician and you’re feeling a bit blocked. What are some things you can do to get the juice flowing again?

Creativity is simply connecting information, so we have to be in a relaxed mental state that is open to seeing these connections, but aware enough to capture them. Getting to this mental state is different for everyone, so I always suggest people experiment and find what works for them. Whenever I feel creatively stumped, my first instinct is to do something to get myself relaxed. I usually go on a long walk, like two hours long, because it takes at least 45 minutes for me to get out of my head and into the ether.

In order to be in the creative flow, it’s really important to be process driven and hold the results loosely. Sometimes it’s better to keep pushing through it. If you’re a writer, keep writing — even if it’s gibberish — and eventually it will flow again. Sometimes it’s better to destroy and start over. Or, if what you’re working on is too broad, impose a limitation to spark your creativity.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/can-limitations-make-you-more-creative-a-qa-with-artist-phil-hansen/feed/24Phil-Hansen-at-TED2013katetedPhil-Hansen-at-TED2013Soul to sole: Eye surgeon Anthony Vipin Das has developed shoes that see for the blindhttp://blog.ted.com/soul-to-sole-eye-surgeon-anthony-vipin-das-has-developed-shoes-that-see-for-the-blind/
http://blog.ted.com/soul-to-sole-eye-surgeon-anthony-vipin-das-has-developed-shoes-that-see-for-the-blind/#commentsSun, 03 Mar 2013 16:00:41 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=71994[…]]]>

Video still from Le Chal, courtesy Anthony Vipin Das.

A haunting black-and-white video screened during the TED Fellows talks depicted people speaking into a device and then walking — at first taking halting steps, then more confident strides. As the video unfolds, the camera zooms in on the faces of the walkers — revealing that they are blind.

With his team, TED Senior Fellow Anthony Vipin Das, an eye surgeon, has been developing haptic shoes that use vibration and GPS technology to guide the blind. This innovation — which could radically change the lives of the vision-impaired — has drawn the interest of the United States Department of Defense, which has recently shortlisted the project for a $2 million research grant. Anthony tells us the story behind the shoe.

Tell us about the haptic shoe.

The shoe is called Le Chal, which means “take me there” in Hindi. My team, Anirudh Sharma and Krispian Lawrence and I, are working on a haptic shoe that uses GPS to guide the blind. The most difficult problems that the blind usually face when they navigate is orientation and direction, as well as obstacle detection. The shoe is in its initial phase of testing: We’ve crafted the technology down to an insole that can fit into any shoe and is not limited by the shape of the footwear, and it vibrates to guide the user. It’s so intuitive that if I tap on your right shoulder, you will turn to your right; if I tap on your left shoulder, you turn to your left.

The shoe basically guides the user on the foot on which he’s supposed to take a turn. This is for direction. The shoe also keeps vibrating if you’re not oriented in the direction of your initial path, and will stop vibrating when you’re headed in the right direction. It basically brings the wearer back on track as we check orientation at regular intervals. Currently I’m conducting the first clinical study at LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India. It’s very encouraging to see the kind of response we’ve had from wearers. They were so moved because it was probably the very first time that they had the sense of independence to move confidently — that the shoe was talking to them, telling them where to go and what to do.

How do you tell the shoe where you want to go?

It uses GPS tracking, and we’ve put in smart taps: gestures that the shoe can learn. You tap twice, and it’ll take you home. If you lift your heel for five seconds, the shoe might understand, “This is one of my favorite locations.” And not just that. If a shoe detects a fall, it can automatically call an emergency number. Moving forward, we want to try to decrease the dependency on the phone and the network to a great extent. We hope to crowdsource maps and build up enough data to store on the shoe itself.

The second phase we are working on is obstacle detection. India has got such a varied terrain. The shoe can detect immediate obstacles like stones, potholes, steps. It’s not a replacement for the cane, but it’s an additive benefit for a visually impaired person to offer a sense of direction and orientation.

Are you still in the development stage?

The insole is already done. We are currently testing it. I’m using simple and complex paths — simple paths like a square, rectangle, triangle and a circle, and complex paths include a zigzag or a random path. Then we are going to step it up with navigation into a neighborhood. From there we’ll develop navigation to distant locations, including the use of public transportation. It will be a stepwise study that we’ll finish over the middle of this year, then go in for manufacturing the product.

You’re an eye doctor. How did you get involved in this?

I’m an eye surgeon who loves to step out of my box and try to see others who are working in similar areas of technology that are helpful for my patients. So Anirudh Sharma and I, we’re on the same TR35 list of India in 2012. I said, “Dude, I think we can be doing stuff with the shoe and my patients. Let’s see how we can refine it.” There was already an initial prototype when he presented last year at EmTech in Bangalore. Anirudh teamed up with one of his friends, Krispian Lawrence of Ducere Technologies in Hyderabad, who is leading the development and logistics to get this into the market. We just formed a really cool team, and started working on the shoe, started testing it on our patients and refining the model further and further. Finally we’ve come to a stage where my patients are walking and building a bond with the shoe.

Are these patients comfortable with the shoe?

Yes, it’s totally unobtrusive. And more importantly, we are working on developing the first vibration language in the world for the Haptic Shoe. We’re looking at standardizing the vibration, like Braille, which is multilingual. But even more crucial than the technology, the shoe is basically talking to the walker. How they can trust the shoe? So that’s an angle that we are looking at. Because at the end of the day, it’s the shoe that’s guiding you to the destination. We’re trying to build that bond between the walker and the sole.

On Thursday at TED2013, Chinese artist Liu Bolin talked about his remarkable photographic installations, in which he paints himself (and sometimes other people) with perfect camouflage to disappear into a busy background. His talk closed with a photo of Liu in the theater at Long Beach, disappearing himself into the stage with paint and pattern over the course of an evening. Watch the timelapse above to understand his process, which involves a lot of people saying “A little to the left… a little to the left …” I caught up with him to discuss.

Tell me about your process.

For the talk, I stood up on stage with my outfit pre-painted, and then one of my assistants worked with the camera and stood back to instruct the other painter on what to do, where to paint, what colors to use, until from the camera I appear invisible.

What inspires you to make a painting?

That’s a perplexing question for me. When I was preparing for the talk initially I thought I would prepare a talk about art, but then I realized it’s really difficult to talk about pure art in China, because it’s always tied to survival. My life in China has always been adding a lot of things to my physical body and mental, emotional state. For example, in my piece “Supermarket,” it has an actual weight on my body.

What makes an ideal shot?

Two things: position of camera and focus. Focus is the most important. For the piece I did for TED, the stage is very colorful and red, so I needed reds and pinks.

You mentioned in your talk that it’s not just an artist’s work but what they stand for. Can you talk more about that?

There’s a difference between Chinese artwork and foreign artwork. As a Chinese artist, I ask a lot of questions about society in my work. When I am abroad, though — for example when I went to the Louvre — because I’m usually overwhelmed by my artwork, I have to make art as a souvenir. The TED piece is more of the latter, a form of memory or a souvenir. This year I have a new plan. I think the TED stage will be the highlight of my new series, Happy New City. In the future I will create new kinds of art. My talk was as a summary to conclude what I’ve done before.

What kind of art do you enjoy?

First of all, that art has to move me. The creator of that art doesn’t have to be a famous person. The artwork I’m most interested in right now are those that take the subject from real life, such as mobile phones, because most people won’t think of those things as art objects. But through the work of this artist, people realize those objects can be art. This kind of art moves me.

Also during Session 8, linguist John McWhorter shares why the language of texting may be evidence of advanced intelligence, not (as we so often think) the decline of society.

Ajit Narayanan works to help autistic children communicate through the creation of his app, Free Speech. This uplifting talk was from Session 8.

In Session 9, Rose George says it’s time to end the taboo over excrement, and start “talking shit.” So many are without basic sanitation, which leads to disease, and the potential to harness the gas that poop gives off is exponential.

James Lyne, also in Session 9, shares the secret lives of cyber criminals — and what you can do to protect yourself against them.

Anas Aremayaw Anas is an undercover journalist. In Session 9, he gave a peek at how he exposes corruption and uncovers injustice.

In Session 10, Hyeonseo Lee talks about her escape from North Korea and her goal to help North Korean refugees.

Eleanor Longden gave an incredible talk in Session 10, detailing how she came to terms with the voices in her head.

Joshua Prager told the moving story of a car crash that changed him forever, and his search for the man responsible.

Daniel Reisel shares his experience training the brains of psychopaths at Session 11.

In session 12, Dan Pallotta delivered a powerhouse talk asking us to think about more than a charity’s overhead when judging its worth.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/gallery-the-second-half-of-ted2013-in-comic-form/feed/2Hyeonseo-LeeshirinsmooreDenise Herzing works on understanding the language of dolphins, with the hopes that we may one day be able to communicate with them.John-McWhorterAjit Narayanan works to help autistic children communicate through the creation of his app, Free Speech. This uplifting talk was from Session 8.At Session 9, Rose George says it's time to end the taboo over excrement, and start "talking shit." So many are without basic sanitation, which leads to disease, and the potential to harness the gas that poop gives off is exponential.James Lyne, at Session 9, shares the secret lives of cyber criminals -- and what you can do to protect yourself against them.Anas Aremayaw Anas is an undercover journalist. In Session 9, he shared how he exposes corruption and uncovers injustice.At Session 10, Hyeonseo Lee talks about her escape from North Korea and her goal to help North Korean refugees.Peter Gabriel, Diana Reiss, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf discuss the prospects of an interspecies internet during Session 10.Eleanor Longden gave an incredible talk in Session 10, detailing how she came to terms with the voices in her head.Joshua Prager, in Session 11, told the moving story of a car crash that changed him forever, and his search for the man responsible.Daniel-ReiselIn session 12, Dan Pallotta delivered a powerhouse talk asking us to think about more than a charity's overhead when judging if its worthy.A new way to judge nonprofits: Dan Pallotta at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/a-new-way-to-judge-nonprofits-dan-pallotta-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/a-new-way-to-judge-nonprofits-dan-pallotta-at-ted2013/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 21:53:29 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=70424[…]]]>

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Dan Pallotta created two huge charity initiatives — AIDS Rides bicycle journeys and Breast Cancer 3-Day events. These initiatives raised $108 million for HIV/AIDS and $194 million for breast cancer. Both had their best years in 2002 … and then Pallotta’s nonprofit went out of business.

In the final session of TED2013, Pallotta shares why that happened: Major sponsors pulled out following a slew of bad press over the idea that his organization was investing 40% of their gross into recruitment and customer service. The backlash came from our basic — and wrong — cultural understanding of charity.

“What we know about charity and the nonprofit sector is undermining the causes we believe in and our desire to change the world,” says Pallotta. We expect businesses and nonprofits to use “two separate rulebooks,” he suggests.

“Business will move the mass of humanity forward, but will always leave behind that 10% of the most disadvantaged and unlucky,” he says — which is why we need philanthropy and nonprofits. But couldn’t the nonprofit sector use the same strategies as the business world to grow their profits and give more money to the needy? After all, says Pallotta, “How do you monetize the prevention of violence against women?”

The nonprofit sector as we know it isn’t working. In the United States, poverty has been stuck at 12% for the last 40 years. Homelessness has not been solved in any major city, and we have no cure for cancer.

“Our social problems are gigantic in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them — and we have beliefs that keep them tiny,” says Pallotta, the president of Advertising for Humanity and author of Charity Case.

Pallotta outlines five ways in which nonprofits are handicapped in their mission to help people.

1. Compensation

“We have a visceral reaction to the idea of people making a lot of money helping others. Interestingly, we don’t have a visceral reaction to the idea that people should make a lot of money not helping other people,” says Pallotta. “It gives a stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing well for yourself and your family and doing well for world.”

For example, the average salary for a CEO of a hunger charity is $80K. Meanwhile the average salary for someone with an MBA, after ten years of school, is $400K.

“We send people marching from the nonprofit sector into the for-profit sector, because they’re not willing to make that kind of compromise,” says Pallotta. “Not a lot of people with $400K talent will make a $316K sacrifice every year.” And actually, it turns out it’s more financially advantageous for these talented business minds to take the big paycheck, give $100K to a hunger charity each year, reap the tax benefits and get the label of “philanthropist.”

2. Adveritsing and marketing

“We tell for-profits to spend, spend, spend on advertising,” says Pallotta, but nonprofits are expected not to advertise — unless the advertising space and airtime is donated. People want to see their money spent directly on the needy.

But Pallotta points out that money invested in advertising can be returned dramatically amplified. He uses his own initiatives as an example. Over nine years, more than 182,000 people participated in Pallotta’s AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Day events, raising a cummulative $581 million.

“We got that many people to participate because we bought full-page ads,” says Pallotta. “Do you know how many people we would have gotten if we advertised with fliers in the laundromat?”

Pallotta stresses that nonprofits need to be able to communicate with the public the incredible work that they are doing — and to ask for bold commitments in return. “People are yearning to be asked to use the full measure of their potential for somthing they care about,” he says.

3. Taking risks on new revenue ideas

Nonprofits are not allowed to try new things, says Pallotta, because public outcry sounds so quickly at a failure. As Pallotta found by using a different model of spending — experimentation is a big no-no for nonprofits.

“Nonprofits are reluctant to attempt any brave, daring new fundraising endeavors, because they’re scared their reputations will be dragged through the mud,” he says.

This fear kills innovation. And if nonprofits can’t try new things and grow — how can they possibly tackle problems of the size that our world has?

4. Time

On the same note, Pallotta points out that it took Amazon four years to turn a profit. While businesses are given time to build the infrastructure they need, non-profits are not afforded this luxury.

“If a non-profit had a dream of building at a magnificent scale, but it would require six years for the money to go to the needy, we would expect a crucifixion,” says Pallotta.

5. Profit to attract risk capital

This point is a simple one: nonprofits can’t go after capital, because they can’t be on the stock market. And how do you build scale without capital?

Pallotta stresses that the nonprofit sector is at an extreme disadvantage when compared with the for-profit sector. The difference is dramatic. Since 1970, 144 nonprofits have crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier. In the same amount of the time, an astounding 46,136 for-profit businesses have surpassed that mark.

So how did this happen? Pallotta looks to American history for the answer. He shares how the Puritanical spirit saw self-interest as a ticket to hell. But charity was seen as the antidote, a way to do penance. “Financial interest was exiled from the realm of charity,” he says.

Today, Pallotta is horrified that only one question is used to evaluate a charity: What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?

“It makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not a part of ‘the cause,'” he says. “This forces organizations to forego what they need for growth.”

Pallotta shares how his organization used a more-business like model — taking $50K in initial funding for AIDS Rides and multiplying it to $108 million, and taking an $350K initial investment in Breast Cancer 3-Day walks and multiplying it to $194 million. Pallotta says that his organization could have gone the route of just giving the initial funding to research, but by investing in growth, they were able to give so much more.

“[And yet] 350 employees lost their jobs because they were labeled overhead,” says Palotta. “This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality.”

Pallotta notes that charitable giving in the United States has remained stuck at 2% of the gross domestic product for the past four decades. What if, instead of requiring charities to tighten their belts, we let them grow and try to increase their marketshare?

Pallotta shows an interesting pie graph. Two percent of the US GDP equals $300 billion, with about $60 billion going to health and human services charities. But what if charitable giving could be boosted just 1%? That would be an extra $150 billion a year — just for health and human services charities.

“Our generation does not want its epithet to read, ‘We kept charity overhead low,'” concludes Pallotta. “We want it to read that we changed the world.”

And so next time you’re investigating at charity, he pleads: “Don’t ask about the size of their overhead — ask about the size of their dreams.”

In an extraordinary finale for TED2013, Eric Whitacre stages a type of performance that has never been seen before, with a choir assembled to sing his composition, “Cloudburst.” It’s not just any choir. He’s joined on stage by 100 live singers formed from choirs from California State University, Long Beach Campus, California State University, Fullerton Campus, and Riverside City College. That’s been done before. He is also joined, via Skype, by 32 singers from 32 different countries connecting from their homes.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Whitacre is famous for his Virtual Choir, and the follow-up, shown first on stage at TED. But no one has ever attempted to put a live choir together with a virtual one. In part this is because of the latency issues of the connection. It’s less than a second, but in singing that is still a potentially huge problem. So, he adapted “Cloudburst,” one of his earliest pieces, to embrace that latency.

The effect is stunning. We listen to this amazing piece, aware of the vast connection enabled by the Internet.

Orly Wahba is here to talk to us about the magic of kindness. As a middle-school teacher, she wanted to make a difference in the life of her students, so she designed “Act of Kindness” cards. These super-simple cards contained directions such as “open the door for someone” or “invite someone to have lunch with you,” along with an instruction to pass on the card once you were done. She wanted her kids to see the ripple effect of kindness.

One day, some construction workers were outside her house. It was hot out, so she brought them drinks — and kindness cards. One of them got a card with the instruction “call your mother and father and tell them how much you love them.” He hadn’t seen his parents in 10 years; he approached her, incredulous. He just needed the prompt.

Wahba shows us a film she put together to tell the story of the world we all live in. “Sometimes we just need to change our perspective.” And she tells us about Life Vest Inside, the organization she founded “because kindness keeps the world afloat.”

Moral philosopher Peter Singer starts the last session of TED2013, “A Ripple Effect?” with a shocking video of a 2-year-old girl in China who was hit by a van — and then a second van — and ignored by passers-by as she lay dying in an alley. He asks of the audience: Would you have stopped and helped this girl? Not surprisingly, the unanimous response was yes. Well, every day that we don’t help others, he says, it’s like leaving this girl crippled in the alley. In 2012, Singer says, UNICEF reported that 6.9 million children under 5 died from preventable poverty-relatable diseases like malaria. Does it really matter that we’re not walking past these children in the street, that they’re far away? According to Singer, there is no morally relevant difference.

There’s a new movement of people who are realizing how necessary it is to help others. It’s called effective altruism. Using empathy and intellect, it appeals to both heart and head. Because reason is not a neutral tool to help you get whatever you want, says Singer, but to get perspective on the situation. Effective altruism has been led by figures in philosophy, math, economics — which may be surprising because people think philosophy has nothing to do with the real world, economics is for the selfish, math is just for nerds. Indeed, the most effective altruists in history — Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett — are “nerds” who realize that it’s necessary to give to charity and to make sure that charity is effective.

Singer asks and answers questions about effective altruism:

1. How much of a difference can I make?

You don’t have to be a billionaire, says Singer. Meet Tony Ord, a philosophy researcher. He realized that with the money he was going to make over his lifetime, he could cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left to live a perfectly adequate life. He started Giving what we can, to ask people to give 10 percent of their income over their lifetime to fight against global poverty.

2. Am I expected to abandon my career?

Meet Will Crouch, a graduate student in philosophy who began 80,000 Hours (roughly the number of hours you spend in your career), which helps people find careers that make the biggest possible difference in the world. Surprisingly, one career he encourages people to go into is finance and banking, because the more you earn the more you can give. If you earn a big salary, rather than becoming an aid worker yourself, you could pay the salaries of five aid workers in developing countries.

Singer and one of his students started an organization called The life you can save, which aims to encourage people to see that charity is part of living a normal life.

3. Isn’t charity bureaucratic and ineffective anyway?

One of the most important aspects of effective altruism is measuring your impact quantitatively. You can pay to provide and train a guard dog for a blind American, which costs about $40,000. But with that money you could cure 400 to 2,000 people in developing countries of blindness from glaucoma, which costs about $20 per person. Resources like Givewell and Effective Animal Activism help find those organizations that are truly effective.

4. Isn’t it a burden to give up so much?

No, says Singer. Giving helps lift the immense weight of living a Sisyphean life. The consumer lifestyle is: Work hard, make money, spend money on goods, run out of money, start again to maintain happiness. It’s a hedonic treadmill you can never get off. Effective altruism allows you to demonstrably contribute to the lives of others while also adding meaning and fulfillment to your life.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/effective-altruism-peter-singer-at-ted2013/feed/29TED2013_0072242_D42_5105thuhaPhotos: James Duncan DavidsonTED2013_0072024_DSC_9451A Ripple Effect: Speakers in Session 12 of TED2013http://blog.ted.com/a-ripple-effect-speakers-in-session-12-of-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/a-ripple-effect-speakers-in-session-12-of-ted2013/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 17:25:13 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=69841[…]]]>TED2013 has come to an end. Here, the final session — about the doers and givers who never stop spreading their ideas. In session 12, these speakers shared their bold words and even bolder actions. And it all built to a riveting finale.

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name for a recap of their talk:

Everything the donating public has been taught about giving is upside down, says Dan Pallotta, and he aims to transform the way society thinks about charity and change.

Julia Sweeney is an actor and writer who does comedic solo shows that tackle deep issues: cancer, family, faith. Her next book is “If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother,” on parenting and being parented. She performs regularly with Jill Sobule, telling stories alongside Jill’s songs, in their “Jill & Julia Show.”

After creating and conducting a worldwide virtual choir on YouTube, Eric Whitacre is now touring with an astonishing live choir.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/a-ripple-effect-speakers-in-session-12-of-ted2013/feed/2fSession12_ARippleEffectmstarestarbSession12_ARippleEffectSexy city: Gabriella Gomez-Mont appointed head of Mexico City’s creativity labhttp://blog.ted.com/sexy-city-gabriella-gomez-mont-appointed-head-of-mexico-citys-creativity-lab/
http://blog.ted.com/sexy-city-gabriella-gomez-mont-appointed-head-of-mexico-citys-creativity-lab/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 17:00:40 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=72221[…]]]>TED Senior Fellow alumna Gabriella Gomez-Mont made a suprise appearance at TED2013 with some incredible news – she’s just been appointed chief of Laboratory for the City (Laboratorio para la Ciudad), a creative think tank for Mexico City that aims to make it not only the most vibrant and sexy city in the world, but an experimental lab for City 2.0. The cultural curator of Tóxico Cultura tells how she tells how she landed herself the job, almost by accident, via a TEDx event.

So now you’re a bureaucrat.

I’m a bureaucrat! I still can’t believe it. I’ve been a bureaucrat for a whole week. I would have never thought. I’ve worked in the independent space for mostly my whole working life. And suddenly in a weird, serendipitous, strange zigzagging road, TED led me right into the bureaucratic structure of Mexico City government.

How did it happen?

About six months ago, I organized a TEDx with two good friends of mine. And we decided to invite Dr. Miguel Angel Mancera, our then mayor-to-be, to speak. He was running for mayor at the time, but everybody knew that he was going to win. We also chose as other speakers people that we thought it would be fascinating for him to hear about – people who have really great ideas for Mexico City. And as well as seeing a huge richness that already is, we also feel that there is enormous potential to make it an even more exciting city.

After that, I got an invitation to propose a project. At first, I thought they would be willing to fund some things on the outside, but it turns out that he invited me to jump on his team.

What did you propose?

It was a project that is called Laboratory for the City. This would be Mexico City’s new creative think tank. This is not a space that exists in any other government in the world.

One of the things we will be doing is to incubate good ideas and create pilot programs. We’ve been very much inspired by, for example, a project in Boston called New Urban Mechanics that’s directed by Nigel Jacobs. They are creating an incubator of good ideas from civil society and inside of government, working as a more experimental space that can mitigate risk. They’ve done amazing stuff, from working with a mother whose kid has autism to create all sorts of tools that she’d been working on informally that will now be implemented in public schools, to, for example, these apps where you can report if there’s a pothole.

If and when ideas prove successful in the experimental space, then we can actually work with other departments to inject these ideas into a more formal structure.

I’m also super excited that this is going to become a space to think about the city in a multidisciplinary manner. It’s very much akin to what I had been doing with Tóxico Cultura, and it also very much incorporates what I’ve learned from three years as a TED Senior Fellow.

I met my mayor because of a TEDx, but the reason why I got offered this job is because, through TED, I’ve been put through a three-year school dealing with things that not only have to do with art and culture, but a lot to do with technology and innovation – basically pushing forth a series of conversations that are not only related to arts and culture.

So what’s your vision?

We’d like for this to become a vortex to think about the city as a concept, and a place to invite people in from all over the world, across disciplines, to try out new ideas. In a conversation with a friend recently, we discussed how it hasn’t been since modernism that the concept of what a city is has been so much up for grabs. What is a digital city? What is a smart city? Is densification a good thing?

Mexico City, which has been a megalopolis since Aztec times, was the poster child of everything a city should try to avoid. We have all the problems of an emerging-world city: social divide, pollution, problems with water, you name it. But now, Mexico City has a great potential to be the epitome of a city that can prototype ideas. It has an absolutely enviable infrastructure, and it’s the eighth largest city economy in the world. This is not something that a lot of people know. Because there’s densification, there are many interesting minds that are there to clash and meet and breed ideas, as Matt Ridley would say. And we just got a prize for sustainable transport, competing against smaller cities like Copenhagen.

Basically TED has been fundamental in pushing this forth in a strange serendipitous way, preparing the mindspace for all that is coming. How can we create cities together? What is needed for Mexico City to become one of the world’s sexiest, most interesting cities?

When Joshua Prager was young, he dreamt he would grow up to play baseball. Or be a doctor. He never imagined that at the age of 19 he would find himself paralyzed in the hospital, and that he’d have to reteach his body to move, to relearn to breathe and speak. In his new book Half-life, Prager returns to Jerusalem, where a truck hit the bus he was riding in and broke his neck.

On stage today Prager tells the story of his return to Jerusalem and the challenge of facing the man who had so radically altered his fate: the driver of that truck. One year ago, he recalls, he set out to find this man. He didn’t have a phone number or address, but he knew his name — Abed — and the town outside Jerusalem where he lived. Twenty-one years before outside this city Prager broke his neck when he was hit by a speeding truck. Now he was off in a silver Chevy, “to find a man and some peace.”

That night 21 years ago, Prager was 19 and reveling in his newfound strength. He had just grown 5 inches and was playing basketball with his friends. He was sitting in a mini-bus off to get pizza he had won on the court when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. Prager’s head snapped back, his shoes flew off, and he flew, too.

When he landed he was a quadriplegic. Over the next few months he learned to breathe, sit and walk, and back home he was in a wheelchair for the next four years in college. After college he went back to Jerusalem. As he reflects, “I rose from my chair for good, leaned on my cane and looked back.” He contacted other victims and looked at old photographs, mourning all he had lost and not yet done and which was now impossible. On that trip Prager sought out Abed, not mentioning his condition or the fact that he knew Abed had had 27 driving violations by the age of 25. He said he wanted to meet with Abed, but later when he called back the number had been disconnected. Then, he said, “I let Abed and the crash go.”

Prager returned to New York and began his life as a journalist, typing hundreds of thousands of words with just one finger. His friend pointed out that all his stories mirrored his own: an entire life changed in one instant. His book was almost complete when he realized he still wanted to meet Abed: “I wanted to hear this man say two words: I’m sorry. People apologize for less.”

Prager went back to Jerusalem to search for Abed. He was carrying yellow flowers as a gift when he realized how ridiculous it seemed. “But what to get a man who broke your fucking neck?” (He settled on Turkish delight.) A torrent of questions filled Prager’s mind: What would Abed say and do? Who had he become since the accident? Who was he? Was he who he was before the crash? Are all of us the result of things done to us? And done for us? As Prager says, “It seemed we could be nothing more than gene and experience.” He looked back on the road and imagined that had the accident not happened he would have been a doctor, a husband, a father. And a little less mindful of time and death.

With help from a man he met in the street, Prager arrived at Abed’s house. Abed’s wife said her husband would be home in four hours. (Her Hebrew wasn’t very good and she later confessed she thought Prager was there to install the Internet.) Abed arrived home. The two men shook hands and smiled, and Prager gave Abed his gift.

Inside Abed began his tale of woe: He had just had surgery on his eyes, he had lost his teeth in the crash. Prager knew the police report said that Abed had come away from the accident unharmed. He brought polaroids and his driver’s license to show Prager what he looked like before. But Prager didn’t want to relive the crash. As he said, “I wanted to exchange Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. I had come for remorse.” He said to Abed, “I understand that the crash wasn’t your fault. But does it make you sad that others suffered?”

“Yes,” said Abed. “I suffered.”

He explained that before the crash he had lived an unholy life, and so God had ordained the crash. Now Abed was religious, and God was happy. Just then on television the news showed a crash in which three people were killed. “It is a pity the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers,” mused Abed. Prager was baffled. “Abed … I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash.” Abed responded, “I once went 60 in a 40.” Thus 27 violations became one. As Prager reflects, “No matter how stark the reality, a human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable.” It was that moment he realized that Abed would not apologize. He was not a particularly bad man, nor a particularly good man. He was a limited man.

“This,” Prager quotes, “is the last of the human freedoms: to choose our attitude in any human circumstance.” The aging and the anxious, the divorced and balding and bankrupt … everyone can choose to rise above bad fortune, to enjoy community, study, work, adventure, friendship, love. The good. Prager quotes Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth some small part of you must be cold.” It’s in the contrats that we find the good. Prager ends his stunning story: “You know death so you may wake each morning pulsing with life.”

Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was a provocative answer to the question of why Europe dominated the world for much of recent history. More recently, he has written The World Before Yesterday, an investigation of traditional societies, and what the modern world might learn from them.

For this talk, he’s focusing on one chapter of that book and asking the question: what can we learn about how to treat elderly people from traditional societies? There are many, many traditional societies, and they are very different from modern societies. “Tribes,” says Diamond, “constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a society.” He is quick to add that they shouldn’t be scorned as primitive, nor romanticized as happy and peaceful.

Now in our society, most old people end up living separately from their children, and away from the friends they grew up with. In traditional societies everyone lives out their lives among their children and friends. That said, their treatment varies wildly.

At the worst extreme, many get rid of the elderly by one of several methods:

Neglect and not feeding them.

Abandoning them when the group moves.

Encouraging suicide.

Killing them.

This happens, says Diamond, mainly under two conditions: Nomads that are incapable of physically carrying them, or people living in marginal or fluctuating environments, such as the arctic or deserts. To us it sounds horrible, “But what could those traditional societies do differently?”

On the opposite extreme are the New Guinea farming societies he has been studying recently and most other sedentary farming societies. There the elderly are fed, remain and live in the same hut or a nearby hut to their children.

There are two reasons for this variation, the usefulness of old people and the society’s values. There are many things that elderly people contribute to their societies: They may be effective in producing food. They can babysit grandchildren, freeing their children to hunt and gather. They can craft things. And often they are the leaders and the most knowledgeable. The last point has a huge significance that would never occur to us in literate societies, “It’s their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death.” In other cases, the society places an emphasis on respect for the elderly, as in East Asia. That contrasts strongly with the United States. Here, the elderly are at a huge disadvantage. For example in job applications, or in hospitals — in that case there is an explicit policy to treat younger people first.

There are several reasons for that low status: The Protestant work ethic, the emphasis on self-reliance and indepenence, and the cult of youth. Clearly, there have been many changes for the better, but there have also been changes for the worse:

There are more old people and fewer young people than at any time. This makes each elderly person more of a burden.

The breaking of social ties with age. Americans move on average every 5 years, and are likely to end up away from their children and friends.

Formal retirement from the workforce, and the loss of self-esteem which accompanies that.

They are, “Objectively less useful than in traditional societies.” The slow pace of change there means what you learn as a child is still useful. Not in ours. (For example, the TV set Diamond grew up with in 1948 had three knobs, today he has a remote with 41 buttons.)

This is clearly a huge problem, but Diamond thinks there are a few good takeaways from traditional societies about the value of our elders:

Elderly people are becoming more and more useful for high-quality child care, particularly as women enter the workforce. Compared to the alternative of paid child care, they may offer better, more motivated child care.

They have gained in value because of the experience in living conditions that are gone, but might come back. None of the young people, including most voters and politicians, have lived through a depression, or a World War.

While there are many things they can’t do as well, there are many things they can do better. Some skills increase with age, like understanding of people and human relationships, the ability to help others without ego, and understanding and making connections between large, interdisciplinary data sets. That makes them better at supervising, administrating, advising, and similar roles.

It’s a lot of food for thought. Diamond reminds us that we should consider, without romanticizing, that, “Traditional society elders have traditionally more rich lives. They think of dangers far less than we do, and they don’t die of heart disease and diabetes.”

Jim Flynn is an expert in intelligence famous for his research on the Flynn effect, the phenomenon that humanity’s IQ has been dramatically increasing since the 1930s. He opens Session 11 today on the last day of TED2013 to help answer the question, “Who are we?”

During the 21st century, our minds have altered, he begins. At the beginning of the century, people were confronted with a concrete world, and their primary interest in dealing with it was to analyze how much it would benefit them. In today’s world we confront a complex world with new habits of mind: classification and abstraction. We clothe the concrete world, trying to make it logical and consistent. We ask not just about the concrete but the hypothetical: what might be, and not just what is.

Today the line for giftedness is an IQ of 130. If you scored people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an IQ of 70. That is the line for mental retardation today. What can account for this?

Imagine a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. Imagine it found target scores from the past century: In the 1865 the target had one bullet in the bullseye; in 1898 it had five bullets in the bullseye; in 1918 100 bullets in the bullseye. The extraterrestrial archaeologist would be baffled. The tests were supposed to measure the keenness of eyesight and whether the shooter has control over their weapon, and so on; how could human skill have advanced so quickly in such a short amount of time? But of course we know the answer: We had muskets at the time of the Civil War, repeating rifles by the Spanish-American War and machine guns by World War I. It was the equipment in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not better eyes or steadiness of hand.

So what mental artillery have we picked up over the last 100 years? Alexander Luria studied neuropsychology in the early half of the century, and he found that people were resistent to classification, to deducing the hypothetical. His subjects simply couldn’t think about anything abstract. Consider this exchange:

Luria: What do crows and fish have in common?
Subject: Absolutely nothing. A fish swims, and a crow flies.
Luria: Are they not both animals?
Subject: Of course not, a fish is a fish, and a crow is a bird.

The man could only think of the objects as how he might use them, not as abstract objects part of a classification system.

Luria told another subject: “There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?” The subject replied, “If it’s big enough, perhaps it has camels.” Luria prompted him again to listen to the conditions, and again he replied that perhaps Hamburg had camels. He was used to camels, and he was unable to imagine that there weren’t any in Hamburg.

How have we come to solve things that aren’t real problems? For one thing, education has changed dramatically. These days the majority of Americans get a high school degree. We’ve gone from four to eight years of formal education to twelve. Fifty-two percent of Americans get some tertiary education. In 1910 a state examination in Ohio given to 14-year-olds asked socially-valued concrete questions, like “What are the capitals of the 45 American states?” In 1990 such a state examination was about abstractions, asking instead: “Why is the largest city of the state rarely a capital?” And the student is supposed to reason that the state legislature is rural controlled and they hated Big City, and so on. Today we educate people to use abstractions and link them logically.

Another shift in the past century has been in employment. In the early 1900s, three percent of the population had cognitively demanding professions; today, it’s 35 percent. And not just professions like lawyer and doctor, sub-professions like technician and computer programmer are also cognitively demanding. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy for paying back their mortgage. Today’s bankers, like the ones involved in the mortgage crisis, have jobs that demand much more from their cognitive faculties. It’s not just the spread of more cognitively demanding jobs but the upgrading of old professions.

Moral intelligence has escalated in the past century because we now take the universal seriously and are able to look for logical connections. In the 1950s and ’60s, people were coming home and talking to their parents about Martin Luther King, Jr. When they asked the generation before them, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and you were black?” their parents responded, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Who have you known who has ever woken up black?” They were fixed in the concrete mores they had inherited, and they were unable to take the hypothetical seriously. As Flynn says, “Without the hypothetical, it’s very difficult to get moral argument off the ground.”

Looking at the evolution of IQ tests, it’s evident that gains have been greatest in certain areas, like classification and analogies. Consider the analogies in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test:

In 1900 people could do simple analogies: Cat is to wildcat as dog is to … ? People answered wolf.
In 1960, two squares followed by a triangle is to two circles followed by a … ? People answered semi-circle.
And in 2010, two circles followed by a semi-circle is to two 16s followed by … ? An eight. People were even able to see beyond the symbol to abstract the concept of halving.

It’s not all good news, says Flynn. Our political intelligence is not improving. Studies show that American young people read less history and literature and less material about foreign places. It’s as if they are ahistoric, living in the present. How different might life be if Americans were more aware of their history, such as the fact that we have been lied to the past 4 out of 6 wars we’ve fought in? Lusitania was not an innocent ship with explosives on it, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and Sadaam Husein hated Al Qaeda. Flynn remarks, “You can have humane moral principals, but if you’re ignorant of history and other cultures, you can’t do politics.”

But the 21st century has undoubtedly shown there are enormous cognitive reserves in orginary people, and they’re finally being tapped into. The aristocracy once was convinced that the average person would never make it, that they wouldn’t develop their cognitive abilities. But we know today that the average human is capable of much, much more.

Daniel Reisel is here to talk about our brains. In particular, how we might change them–and how this kind of thinking might just change the tenor of society as a whole.

He introduces us to Joe, who’s 32, and a murderer. Reisel met Joe in Wormwood Scrubs, a high-security prison that houses England’s most dangerous prisoners. On a grant from the UK Department of Health, Reisel visited the jail to study inmates’ brains and try to find out what lay at the root of their behavior. “Was there a neurological cause for their condition?” he asks. “And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure?”

Initial research showed that psychopaths like Joe indeed had a different physiological response to emotions such as distress or sadness. “They failed to show the emotions required; they failed to show the physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy,” Reisel describes. MRI scans (yes, transporting psychopaths across London in rush hour to place them in a scanner, unadorned by metal objects such as, say, shackles, was a nightmare) showed an interesting phenomenon and a tentative answer: “Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and their immoral behavior.”

Acquiring moral behavior is a part of growing up, like learning to speak. By 6 months, we can discriminate between animate and inanimate objects. By 10 months, we can imitate actions. By the time we’re 4, most of us are able to understand the intentions of others, a prerequisite for empathy. But that’s not to say that it’s not possible to learn such behaviors in later life.

Reisel wants to talk neurogenesis. This is the birth of new neurons in the adult brain, and Reisel is fascinated by its promise. He left his work with psychopaths to work on mice, whose brains he studied in very different environments. Some were kept in a shoebox devoid of entertainment (similar to, say, a prison cell); others lived in an “enriched environment.” Mice in the former condition lost their ability to bond with their fellow mouse; those in the latter showed the growth of new brain cells and connections. “They also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks,” says Reisel. “Of course, these mice do not develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street. But their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior.”

Could this research influence the design of our prison systems? “When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with dysfunctional amygdalas is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth,” he says. He’s not suggesting that we should pack up all our prisons. Instead, perhaps we might think of rehabilitation through programs such as Restorative Justice, which encourages perpetrators to take responsibility for their actions. “This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration,” says Reisel. It’s a fascinating proposition. “Such programs won’t work for everyone. But for many, they could be a way to break the frozen sea within.”

It’s a charming, chilling, thought-provoking talk. Reisel leaves us with three lessons from his work over the past fifteen years. We need to change our mindset, he says. “The moment we speak about prisons, it’s like we’re back in Dickensian — if not medieval — times. For too long we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human beings can’t change, and, as a society, it’s costing us dearly.” Next, we need to prompt and promote cross-disciplinary collaboration. “We need people from different disciplines, lab-based scientists, clinicians, social workers and policy makers, to work together.”

Finally, we need to use our own brains, our own amygdalas, and we need to rethink our view of prisoners such as Joe. After all, if we see psychopaths as irredeemable, how are they ever going to see themselves as any different? Wouldn’t it be better for Joe to spend his time in jail by training his amygdala and generating new brain cells? Reisel concludes: “Surely that would be in the interest of all of us.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/training-the-brains-of-psychopaths-daniel-reisel-at-ted2013/feed/8TED2013_0069725_D41_4205helenwaltersPhotos: James Duncan DavidsonTED2013_0069684_D41_4164Understanding what we believe about life after death: Daniel Ogilvie at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/understanding-what-we-believe-about-life-after-death-daniel-ogilvie-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/understanding-what-we-believe-about-life-after-death-daniel-ogilvie-at-ted2013/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 15:26:05 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=70337[…]]]>

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

When Daniel Ogilvie was a child, he often imagined what would it be like to be dead. (“I think that’s why I was so popular.”) He’d imagine himself in a coffin, cold and lonely. So he asked his Sunday school teacher what heaven was like. What he heard: Heaven is like a picnic that goes on forever with friends and loved ones. That didn’t appeal: How long, wondered Ogilvie, before they got on each other’s nerves? “I think four or five hours into eternity, and I would have had it.”

Ogilvie grew up and became a professor of psychology at Rutgers University. But he was reminded of those childish thoughts when his 4-year-old daughter came to him crying one night and said, “I don’t want to be a thing that dies.” He didn’t know how to respond; his wife simply said, “Don’t worry, dear, you have a long life ahead of you.”

Now, Ogilvie thought, for many families, that would be the time to talk about heaven. “It’s one of many platforms for later discussions about God, the soul and the afterlife.” And he is worried about how we do this. Afterlife beliefs are not taught to kids as “This is what we believe,” but rather as “These are facts.” These ideas are then internalized, and protected by feelings. Views that accord with it are accepted, views that don’t are attacked.

He designed a course to explore that: “Causes and Consequences of Soul Beliefs.” And in that class, they uncovered some interesting ideas. For example, why is it so easy for children to understand the idea that there’s a soul and there’s an afterlife? It is, he thinks, because “They already suspect that something is going to survive their death.” For example, as a child in his imaginary coffin, he thought he was cold and lonely: He was imagining himself dead, but his psychology continued.

One of the remarkable things about humans, says Ogilvie, is that we are able to be in one place and imagine ourselves somewhere else. “We’re always thinking and preparing for the next step.” That’s what happened to his daughter. She “was lying in bed thinking about mental time travel. She went too far and came back with very bad news.” We can imagine all kinds of things, but the thought of death is unacceptable.

And Ogilvie wants to make clear, “Religions have been good for us for most of history.” They helped with group bonding. With more organization though, there is “the emergence of priesthood, the emergence of rulers, chiefs who said you not only need to behave yourself in this particular way but that this is how the gods want you to do it.” They exert social control. “I’ve noticed people with different beliefs don’t like each other,” he drily notes. “Lots of wars are fought over it. That’s a big concern for me.”

So, he asks us to do what he asks his students to do. “Talk about what you were told to believe. Have that conversation with other people.” That gives us a broader perspective. He finishes by returning to what his wife was able to do with his daughter, “My wife directed a conversation to the joys, the sorrows, the beauty, the awesome opportunities of this life. Engage in this conversation. Do it for me, for yourself, for the wellbeing of our planet.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/understanding-what-we-believe-about-life-after-death-daniel-ogilvie-at-ted2013/feed/5TED2013_0069569_D41_4049BenLPhoto: James Duncan DavidsonTED2013_0069204_D42_5055Who Are We?: The speakers in Session 11 of TED2013http://blog.ted.com/who-are-we-the-speakers-in-session-11-of-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/who-are-we-the-speakers-in-session-11-of-ted2013/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 13:15:18 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=69788[…]]]>The name says it all: this session took a look at everything that human beings do, think and know. From thoughts on what makes a civilization decline to the roots of our morality, these speakers shared some of the stats and stories that point to our collective identity.

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk:

How are you feeling about all the attention, and why do you think there has been such a strong response from the public?

It is exciting and a bit hard to believe. This is my third Long Beach conference, and the amount of press this year has completely trumped anything that was written in the past two. I think it’s mostly due to the provocation of using the words “4D printing.” We fully believe in this technology and that it truly is 4D — meaning parts transform on their own over time. But at the end of the day, the most excitement is probably just from the name. Hopefully the technology that Stratasys developed, the demonstrations we showed and the continual development of this research will emphasize that it is truly a paradigm shift in how we think of materials and making today.

In your talk you spoke about applications for space. Can you tell us more?

We’ve recently submitted for a NASA solicitation and are hoping to continue designing and developing new methods for full reconfiguration and self-assembly of highly functional space systems. We are interested in the opposite methodology of the international space station (or space construction today), in other words, complex structures made in expensive and complex ways that come together in even more complex ways — often requiring astronaut construction and costly energy sources. How can we develop simple systems that can be shipped compactly, that then expand and become fully functional on demand while in orbit, that can be fully reconfigurable to various other highly functional systems, completely on their own and triggered by activation energies naturally found in the space environment — such as pressure, light and temperature change?

Tell us more about the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. How did it come about? What are your hopes for it in terms of research and practical application?

The lab is just starting and really an exciting time. We recently were offered space at a great place at MIT called The International Design Center, and we’re currently fundraising, grant writing and collaborating with various industry partners to kickstart the lab for the upcoming year. We are interested in developing near-term applications that can make a more adaptive and resilient environment, as well as very far-term design for the future of “making” and lifelike materials at the macro scale. Near-term projects in clued adaptable infrastructure such as piping and bridges, self-assembly for low-energy manufacturing, and passive energy construction techniques. Some of our long-term projects include developing programmable matter to be recyclable or evolvable, toolsets for a new generation of matter programmers (as distinct from computer programmers), and systems that converge natural/physical with synthetic/digital worlds.

Yesterday, Kate Stone charmed the assembled TED audience with her tales of failing exams, living on a sheep farm in Australia, and developing genuinely interactive paper. Today, she shared three simple skills she’s learned along the way–and described why she thinks these are actually critical life skills.

1. Know how to dig a hole.

Stone was instructed to dig a hole for a cattle grid during her time farming sheep in the Outback of Australia. “You know how to dig a hole?” the farmer asked her. Pfft. Of course she did. Turns out, she had no idea. “He came back and just looked at how far I’d got. I thought I was doing a really good job, digging out the top soil, and working across the space that needed to be a hole.” Incorrect. Turns out, the most effective technique involves making the deepest hole possible, and then letting the surrounding earth cave in so you can shovel the earth away, nice and easy. Why is this relevant? “If you want to make change, if you want to make anything happen, you can either convince the whole world you’re right or you can affect a few people deeply,” she explains. The latter is easier. “If you’re right, they’ll tell some people who will tell more people. Focus on something deeply; let it infect everything else.”

2. Learn how to ride a motorbike.

Asked by one farmer who employed her whether she knew how to ride a motorcycle, Stone again led with a bald-faced lie. “I said I could, when I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life.” She wrote off at least four bikes on that particular farm, she confesses, though she argues that the terrain was hardly conducive to a beginner. “I swear I fell off every single day,” she says cheerfully. Sounds awful; so why is this a life skill? It’s all about your focus. “I have a distinct image of going down this little hill, I’d see a rock in the road and I’d think ‘I’m going to hit it! I’m going to hit it!'” she laughs. Invariably, she’d hit the rock and fall. But one time, she saw two rocks and couldn’t figure out which one to look at, so she stared at the gap. Herein lies the lesson. “Where you look is where you go. If you only see the way forward, you don’t see the obstacles. If all you look at is the obstacles, you’ll fall off.”

3. Figure out how to pour from a barrel of oil.

“With big oil cans, the holes are at the side on the top,” Stone describes. “The intuitive way to pour from it is to pour with the hole at the bottom.” But then the air can’t get in, so you invariably end up with a big mess. The first time she did this, her farmer boss asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. “Twist the barrel around, have the hole at the top so air can go in the top half and oil can come out the bottom half and you pour it out nice and easy. It made me realize that, quite often, the way you do something appears to be counterintuitive. Doing things the way you think you should do them is often the worst way possible.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/three-important-life-skills-according-to-kate-stone/feed/1kate stonehelenwalterskate stoneLive a life to do with beauty: Shane Koyczan at TED2013http://blog.ted.com/live-a-life-to-do-with-beauty-shane-koyczan-at-ted2013/
http://blog.ted.com/live-a-life-to-do-with-beauty-shane-koyczan-at-ted2013/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 01:45:26 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=70266[…]]]>

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Spoken-word poet and artist Shane Koyczan is onstage at TED, sharing his own experiences and charming us silly. This is an intimate, heartfelt look into a life that has not always been easy. “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says.

Being told to stand up for yourself is a common response to trouble. But “that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.” Asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, Koyczan found it a difficult question to answer. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man,” he says. “When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.” (Koyczan, it should be noted, has an impressively full beard.) “When I was 8, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was 9, I saw the movie Jaws and said ‘no thank you.'”

He said he wanted to be a writer. And he was told: “Choose something realistic.” He said he wanted to be a professional wrestler. “They said, don’t be stupid. They asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be. I wondered what made my dreams so easy to dismiss.”

In Koyczan’s world, even his dreams were called names. But he kept on. I was going to be a wrestler, and my name would be the Garbage Man. “My finishing move was going to be the Trash Compactor.” He turned to poetry, and he concludes this beautiful, lyrical presentation by reading the poem “To This Day,” which he wrote to explore the impact of bullying, and which was animated through an open call for contributions (the film plays in the background). It’s a clarion call for action, and it makes the audience decidedly weepy. A sample:

so we grew up believing no one
would ever fall in love with us
that we’d be lonely forever
that we’d never meet someone
to make us feel like the sun
was something they built for us
in their tool shed

It’s a bravura performance, and a tearful Koyczan receives a prolonged standing ovation.

Hyeonseo Lee saw her first public execution at age 7. A child growing up in North Korea, the moment affected her, but she didn’t have the frame of reference to understand the government repression going on around her.

“When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet,” she says in Session 10 of TED2012. “I was very proud … I often wondered about the outside world, but I thought I would spend my life in North Korea.”

In the 1990s, a famine struck North Korea, killing an estimated million people. And while Lee’s family was able to eat, in 1995, her mom brought home a girl. With the girl was a letter that read, “When you read this, our family members will not exist in this world because we have not eaten.”

“I was so shocked,” says Lee. “This was the first time that I heard people in my country were suffering.”

She began to hear of people surviving by eating grass and tree bark. While she lived only across a river from the Chinese border — close enough to see their lights, and wonder why her side was so dark — the bodies floating in the river of drowned escapees was enough to deter escape.

Lee can’t share a lot of details of how she left North Korea — she can only say that at some point, she was sent to stay with distant relatives. She thought she’d see her immediate family again soon. That wouldn’t happen for another 14 years.

Lee lived in China, essentially on her own, posing as if she were Chinese so that she wouldn’t be sent back to North Korea.

“One day, my worst nightmare came true,” says Lee. She was caught by the Chinese police. Someone had accused her of being North Korean, and she was subjected to brutal tests of her ability to speak Chinese. “I was so scared, I thought my heart would explode.”

Luckily, she passed the test and felt a surge of relief when the officers said: “She isn’t North Korean.”

“Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China, sent back, tortured, imprisoned, publicly executed … It was a miracle,” says Lee. “It’s tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identity just to survive. Even after getting out, their whole world can be turned upside down.”

Ten years later, Lee started life over again in South Korea, learning a new culture and going to university. But soon, she received another panic in the form of a telephone call. North Korean officials had intercepted money sent to her family. She needed to help them escape, and quick.

On the stage, Lee narrates the incredible journey to get her family out. When they were caught by Chinese police, Lee managed to convince them that her family was “these deaf and dumb people that I am shepherding.” It worked, and Lee’s family made it through China and into southeast Asia. But then they were arrested for border crossing.

“This was one of the lowest points in my life,” says Lee. “I did everything to help my family to get to freedom and we came so close. But they were thrown in jail just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.”

It was the kindess of a stranger that saved them. A random man asked Lee what was wrong. He took her to an ATM and gave her money to pay her family’s way out of jail. When she asked him why, he said: “I’m not helping you, I’m helping North Korean people.”

Lee’s story is powerful and a good reminder that getting to freedom is only half the battle.